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Category Archive: Gentrification

In the past year, across North America, artists in solidarity with anti-displacement struggles are voicing their discontent with the neoliberal turn towards developer-driven artwashing and displacement, but are they being heard?

Vancouver Mural Festival, at the core of its structure, does not represent a culturally diverse or marginal perspective as you might expect from a mural festival. Instead it is the initiative of a group of predominantly white men who have built alliances, not with the everyday people of Vancouver, but with real estate developers, Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) and the City government.

While arts and culture aren’t bad things, governments and developers have increasingly instrumentalized them as a way to stimulate market value in marginalized and working class communities. Under intense pressure by the City to develop, BC Artscape is the latest wolf in sheep’s clothing making an incursion into Chinatown.

On a cold Saturday night in January a haphazard line-up has formed outside the Fox Cabaret. Everyone is underdressed – young women with leather jackets draped over tank-tops and men with tight black jeans, thin t-shirts, and undersized polo hats. Above, the refurbished façade glows red, hinting at the building’s previous incarnation as a worn-down porn theater. However, the crowds outside are not here to enjoy “adult entertainment,” they have come to dance at one of Vancouver’s up-and-coming nightclubs.

During the last weeks of August, many Vancouverites spent time checking out the city’s first annual Mural Festival – an exhibition of 35 murals by over 40 local street, graffiti and mural artists mostly clustered around the lower Main Street corridor. The event was sponsored by a $200,000 grant from the City of Vancouver, with additional support from Mount Pleasant BIA and Burrard Arts Foundation

Last spring, an Economist article declared Vienna, Geneva, and Vancouver to be “mind-numbingly boring” cities. The concept is well worn. The author of the article doesn’t claim to be making some grand statement on Vancouver. Nonetheless, Vancouverites responded explosively. A lot rests on our city being desirable. There’s a looming sense that somehow this matters. Even in local artistic communities, defined by a sort of rejection of the placid kind of fun that Vancouver offers, musicians and artists and label-heads are quick to reject the title “No Fun City.”

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Acknowledgement

The Mainlander is an online publication covering politics and social issues on unceded Indigenous territory belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. The settler colony of British Columbia was created using various forms of strategic violence and dispossession, which has structured our society and created lasting injustices that today persist. We acknowledge that, in the present, new forms of colonial violence and dispossession continue to be established on these territories.